If the purpose of Virginia’s secession was to ease the minds of Virginia’s slaveholders, the move backfired. With the Commonwealth’s proximity to Union territory, especially the federal capital of Washington, D.C., and with the move of the Confederate capital into Virginia, it became a major focus for Union military activity. While reviewers are finding various reasons to quibble with Gary Gallagher’s recent book, The Union War, he is correct that the presence of northern troops had a way of upsetting the slave system, even if the soldiers did not see themselves as liberators of slaves.

This phenomenon, of course, was first seen around Fortress Monroe in late May 1861 after Gen. Benjamin Butler gave refuge to fugitive slaves. With this act, Butler set in motion forces he could not entirely control and neither could anyone else. Not only did a stream of slaves descended on the fortress, but the discipline of the slave system broke down in the surrounding area. On June 21, the National Republican, the semi-official organ of the Republican Party in Washington, D.C., carried the following story.

Virginia slaveholders clearly were aware of what was happening, and attempted to respond to deal with disruption caused by Union forces and the subsequent flight of slaves from their owners. The Virginia State Convention, meeting on June 19, 1861, in its second session had the following ordinance reported. To whit:

While the proposed ordinance never specifies the property in question, the implication is clear enough it is referring to slaves. So with the flight of slaves to Fortress Monroe and in Northern Virginia, the Virginia Convention moved to organize home guard militia to keep more slaves from fleeing to Union controlled territory.

Likewise, an ordinance was proposed to the convention to retaliate against the northern states for the slaves already lost to the contraband of war policy. One that would hurt the northern states in their pocket books. It read:

Clearly, by organizing stay-at-home militia and threatening to withhold debts owed to the North, the Virginia Convention hoped to end the contraband-of-war policy and reinforce the slave system against Union incursions into the Commonwealth. What it was not reckoning with was the strong determination of many people in the North following Fort Sumter to crush the Confederacy, the political focus of which was now gathering in the new capital of Richmond, a mere 100 miles from Washington, D.C. It also did not take into account the fierce desire of the slaves to be free and their willingness to act on that sentiment given even the smallest opportunity. White Virginians and other southerners would learn these facts in the months and years to come.

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About Donald R. Shaffer

Donald R. Shaffer is the author of _After the Glory: The Struggles of Black Civil War Veterans_ (Kansas, 2004), which won the Peter Seaborg Award for Civil War Scholarship in 2005. More recently he published (with Elizabeth Regosin), _Voices of Emancipation: Understanding Slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction through the U.S. Pension Bureau Files_ (2008). Dr. Shaffer teaches online exclusively (i.e., a virtual professor). He lives in Arizona and can be contacted at donald_shaffer@yahoo.com